Let's be realistic.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

I have seen the first Zatoichi film and I quite liked it. I thought that it would play out like the Yojimbo movies, he walks into a town and uses his methods to wipe out criminal gangs but it turns out that instead not only do you need to watch the first movie in order to know what is going on but I don't think even that way it holds up.So Zatoichi is going about his day job of traveling to towns to perform Masseur work and cutting anyone dumb enough to disturb the peace or stop him, despite his idea to use violence as little as possible. When he gets there and performs his work he finds out a secret I'm not sure what it is and for that he must die by the hands of this guy. While that is going on he builds a relationship with a woman (...Considering what happened in the last movie with you just walking off I know where it's going) and takes her away from a samurai who believes that she looks like a woman both the samurai and Zatoichi have fallen in love with.Okay, onto the things I don't like. Well the ending. It ends with Zatoichi fighting a crime boss from the first movie, not afterwards but just when it started. I would much rather seeing Zatoichi kick his ass and then leave. I mean during, really? They couldn't cut off the movie in any other way? How about when the people can't find Zatoichi they leave and we see him sitting where he was. I just think that this is one of the worst ways to end a movie.That and some plot elements just aren't explained. The samurai I was talking about earlier is Ichi's brother. My problem with it is that you don't know he's Ichi's brother until his last 2 scenes before the movie is over. Their mutual love of the same person is not foreshadowing, if that was the movie foreshadowing then it is the clumsiest foreshadowing I have ever seen. There is nothing and I think that it would have been a much better movie if they established this before making it the focal point of the last 20 minutes! Please, tell me this is nowhere near the best in the series.I should tell you what I liked. Well, I did like the story and I do think that this series despite the above paragraphs is a series worth following. That and the guy playing Zatoichi, while it is weird to watch a movie where the hero almost always has his eyes shut does seem like a good actor. The same thing can be said for all the main players.I all honesty, this isn't really that good of a film. Personally, I found the original and Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo to be better movies. Everything here just feels rushed, under-explained and abrupt. I just think at the end of the day, this is not worth it anywhere near as others even in the series, let alone the genre.

There were seriously 25 Zatoichi films made in the time span of 1962 to 1973. Another, almost equally as amazing fact is that the second movie, The Tale of Zatoichi Continues, came out the exact same year as the first movie did. Naturally it's shorter, clocking in at one hour and ten minutes. It's directed by Kazuo Mori, best known for directing other Zatoichi films, and is the last Zatoichi film in B&W.The plot of the second movie is way less engaging than the plot of its predecessor. This time we follow Ichi as he's tailed by a group of killers after learning a powerful political figure's secret as he was giving him a massage. It turns out the lord has some mental problems, and his retainers try to conceal this secret from people. There's also a subplot about Ichi's one-armed brother Yoshiro (played by Shintaro Katsu's own brother Tomisaburo Wakayama, credited as Jo Kenzaburo) who is actually a wanted criminal, and the film culminates with the face-off between the two brothers. There's also another subplot which has Ichi travel to a temple of the first movie's town to pay respect at the grave of the samurai from the first film. There he meets Tane (the girl from the previous movie) who's about to marry a carpenter.The Tale of Zatoichi Continues follows some continuity by taking place a year after the events of the first movie, which is constantly referenced. One thing we learn about Zatoichi is that he had a soft spot for a girl named Chiyo, who left him for his brother (who then killed her). There's also a prostitute who has an one-night stand with Ichi at one point in the film.The Tale of Zatoichi continues is nowhere near as interesting as its prequel, but there are occasional good sword fights to be found in here. This film is more action-oriented and you'll find yourself enjoying Zatoichi's ass-kicking escapades if you can suspend the disbelief that he's completely blind and yet unmatched in sword fights.Even though this movie is forgettable and doesn't have much going for it, I must say the visuals are superior to the first film's visual outlook. The sequel sports some nice shots of characters by the water and the fights are better. However, the music is kinda strange; at some points it loudly builds up, only to get interrupted by a sudden cut.Hightlight of the film: the sudden end where Zatoichi delivers a killing cut to a yakuza gang leader.

Never mind the first film to take its time in introducing the character to us, of which I am glad that it didn't rush. Now that we and the others in the film "know" him ( although part of the fun is that nobody is really able to know him and his skill really) the film goes to hyperdrive mode straightaway. It's fascinating to see this in retrospect, knowing it is a long franchise, and trying to map out the development and where the film and its success came from. Inthink the first film is strong because it takes its time in creating its own universe, simply so that the sequels don't have to work so hard in setting things up. It's nice, and so is the self-reference it allows both in humour and mythology, but the films quickly morph into each other. It doesn't seem to be a problem here, since aren't all series all about working for or against the set rules and archetypes in the previous films?Anyway, I think the two films have very well set up Zatoichi's blindness as a metaphor, yet it's the first film that's more ambitiously conceived. In this respect these two first films are like "Yojimbo" and "Sanjuro", Kurosawa's duology. The last shot of this film, however, is one of the coolest film moments I know of. Seriously. That last five seconds.

This movie is, I guess, the first of the very long & very excellent zato-ichi series starring the incomparable Shintaro Katsu who also starred in the shorter but every bit as impressive if quite different series: The Razor. I lived in San Francisco in the 1960s & 1970s & used to go watch these films every week at the Japanese theater in the old "Japan Town". Loved them then, love them now. This film in particular is a classic in every way: cinematographically it looks like Eisenstein - every shot a classic. The compositions, textures & tonalities are breathtakingly beautiful. Dramatically, it's every bit as gripping as Yojimbo or the best Ford westerns (e.g. Stagecoach). And finally the sword-fight choreography - None better. Terrific movie!